Suchergebnisse

AbstractWhat determines the performance of international organisations (IOs)? We argue that funding structures remain an overlooked driver of IO performance. Over the past decades, donor governments have provided an increasing share of their contributions to IOs in the form of earmarked resources, which provide them with the opportunity to restrict the use of funding to specific themes, sectors, regions, countries or projects. This development has raised concerns about the ability of IOs to perform their duties, given that earmarked funds distort programme priorities away from recipient need and increase transaction costs for IO staff. Beyond qualitative evidence from case studies, concerns about the performance‐related effects of earmarking remain untested in large‐N analysis. Drawing on 64 performance assessments of 32 IOs from 2009 to 2021, undertaken by the Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network, we employ latent factor analysis to extract measures of process performance—the extent to which IOs have rules, procedures and routines in place to plan strategically, manage operations efficiently, liaise with partners effectively, monitor results and promote institutional learning—and outcome performance—the extent to which IOs achieve results that are relevant, efficient and sustainable. Using multivariate regressions, we find that earmarked funding is negatively related to process performance. Our result is robust to alternative model specifications and an instrumental variable design that helps mitigate concerns about endogeneity. These results have important implications for our understanding of IO performance and policy implications for donors of IOs.

AbstractOver the past two decades, donor funding of international organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations, has shifted from core resources toward earmarked contributions. While core resources provide IOs with discretion how to achieve their mandates, earmarked contributions require IOs to focus their assistance on specific themes, sectors, countries, or projects, as determined by the donors. Our understanding of the drivers and effects of earmarked funding has been limited by the lack of systematic data. To address this gap, we introduce the Earmarked Funding Dataset. The dataset contains 342,812 earmarked aid activities from nearly 50 donors with over 340 IOs with a mandate in international development from 1990 to 2020. We first explore the data descriptively to cast light on the evolution of the multilateral development system. We then use the data to examine whether and how donors financially reward well-performing IOs. To that end, we combine our data with newly available performance data synthesized from Multilateral Organization Performance Assessment Network (MOPAN) evaluations of 32 IOs in 2009–2020. Using difference-in-difference estimations, we find a significantly positive relationship between outcome performance and earmarked contributions. In contrast, performance does not seem to affect core resources. These patterns suggest that donors reward well-performing multilaterals with more funding, albeit based on development outcomes which are not easily contractible. From a policy perspective, these findings suggest that performance-based approaches to aid allocation—as they are currently practiced—upload the financial risks of organizational reform processes to international organizations.